I did a search of my own past posts to find out what Doug could be talking about, and I think I found it: a post that's one year and four months old. It starts "Doug, feel free to delete this if it's improper or misplaced".

I think that might evince an intention on my part to stay within the rules. If it was a "spectacular rule break", I'm surprised to find that it wasn't deleted. I have no problem if it's deleted now, of course, any more than I did at the time.

Most of my recent posts have been about planetary nomenclature in various threads. Before that, it appears my biggest burst of postings was on the occasion of Cassini's near flyby of Iapetus. As far as my posts on other issues go, as far as I can tell they were inoffensive, few, and within UMSF rules as they existed at the time.

At this point I think I may be taking too seriously what started as a humorous observation of a quirky fact. I'm just a little baffled to find myself charged with crimes against UMSF at this late date.

you're not a person who's posting I 'recognise' on the forum. Shaka, Centsworth, Ustrax, Stu - I know what I'm going to get when I see their name. Sometimes it makes me cringe, sometimes it makes me laugh.

I wanted to apologize to everyone if I got out of line. I was only trying to get clarity. I certainly apologize if my ham-handed attempts to do so resulted in the pulling of the Manned Spaceflight thread; that was inexcusable behavior on my part. I ask your forgiveness, and you can be assured that I will post nothing controversial from here forward.

I should have remembered Will Rogers' wise words: If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

I, for one, welcome again our old dictatorial overlords! Some day, we'll have to write a book "Doug's Rules of (Totalitarian) Order" for feeding and care of forums. I imagine they would be pretty relevant for other things too, like Astronomy clubs, that descend into parliamentary madness..

--------------------

Space Enthusiast Richard Hendricks --"The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible." --Rescue Party, Arthur C ClarkeMother Nature is the final inspector of all quality.

Despite quite clear rules, despite this very clear thread, despite very very direct and unquestionable instructions within the very thread in question, including

"If you can't discuss something without wandering into the fringes of politics - then don't discuss it here. "and"no politics means no politics"

Someone posted "NASA is essentially operating under a 6 month continuing resolution to spring of next year (continuing at FY08 budget levels) until the new President submits a new budget, which may need to be approved through the legislative process. So this Friday's decision, if it is for continuation, may still be subject to political review."

For those that can not figure it out for themselves - that post contains politics. Do you get it now? This member has had that post deleted, and is now serving a 7 day suspension. I'm not sure what it is going to take to get people to follow the rules - let this serve as an example to that member, and everybody - that no politics means no politics.

If you're left thinking "But how can we talk about such-and-such without mentioning politics at all?" - the answer is that you shouldn't be talking about whatever it is that you somehow require politics to discuss.

I will repeat this once again

No politics, means no politics. No exceptions. Deletions, suspension, and bans will follow for those determined to ignore that rule and direct instructions from the admin/mod team.

I've always thought of this place as 'planetary & solar spaceflight' rather than just umsf. The discussions are very heavily skewed that way.

I'd claim the central thrust is even narrower than that; it's about amateur space/computer buffs sharing clever new visualizations of publicly-available raw data that data space probes have collected from other worlds. All on-topic discussion supports this one way or another. For example, the Falcon launches are intensely interesting because they're our best hope for all kinds of future missions.

The rule I'm trying to make myself follow is: if you're not showing off a picture you made, talking about a picture someone else made, or providing information that'll eventually be useful (or at least interesting) to someone making a picture, then you're probably off-topic.

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